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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Getting ready for the new year....

I haven't totally been lost in Christmas thinking. I've been school thinking. I've been collecting my projects and straightening up. Around here, you clean one mess, you end up making another.It's quite an interesting life.

So I bought school supplies. I'm going to have 3 grades this upcoming year: 4th, 2nd & K4. I like to start the year with new supplies, it's just fun. The markers all have perfect points, the crayons aren't broken, pencils can be found. Ahhh, perfection.

Everyone gets their own school box. Even Mini-E. So we've all got designated colors. Pink, for Mini-Me (aka Princess Pink). Blue for G-man. Green or Orange for J-man and then purple for Mini-E.It's fantastic how great it works. I don't have to worry about them losing each other's things, they don't have to share. Most of the time, it's peaceful. We also keep around some clipboards. It makes for car schooling adventures, it also makes sitting in the recliner and doing school work a wee bit easier.

This year I did something different for pencils. Last few years, I bought pencils for their own school boxes. This year, I bought generic pencils. I bought some that could be considered girlie, I bought some plain ol' yellow #2's and, get this, I bought blue pencils. They're made of recycled Denim!! It rocks! They don't write very dark and this may present a problem, but it's still a cool concept.

We've had our workbooks and core curriculum for some time now, I've removed it all from the bubble wrap and dumped it in one box. We had a good look over it. We marveled at the #4 on the Fourth grade books and we oooohed over the giant 2's on the Second Grade stuff.

The big kids were thrilled to see the K4 books for J-man, but I'm not sure what he thought. Until the day before yesterday. "I want to do school work!"

I was not prepared. So we talked colors.I'll take these books and put them in their places. We're still finishing up some work from the old grades, so this has sort of created a bookshelf space shortage. It's been quite the tragedy.

I'll take the teacher's curriculum plans and put them in binders. I love three ring binders.I wish I'd invented them. And post-it notes. And white-out.Oh, well.

I'll then take the work books and pull out all the pages. It's mind numbing work that I do in front of the TV. I can't quite manage to pull pages out and eat popcorn at the same time, though. I'm not sure where that deficiency comes from...Then I'll take the pages and put them in a hanging folder. One folder per subject.I'm only anal about a few things. This is one of them.Each kid has a color. The color choices when I started this gig were few, or I was shopping in the wrong store, I'm not sure. So we have Red, Blue and right now we have Yellow. J-man says that "Lello" is his favorite color. (It was news to me.)

I almost bought Mini-E some purple hanging folders, because they were there, but she won't need them for about 2 more years. I was afraid the Professor might not understand why I was getting SOOOO far ahead of myself.That's one work book all done.

And here's the final look. The green folders hold my records. The yellow folders in the far back corner will probaby be replaced -- they are "games" for the younger set. They came with the school stuff. From about 5 years ago. :-)

So there you go. I'm ready, physically, for the next adventure in schooling.I've got a planner that's covered in post-it notes. I've got my history/geography stuff to look through. I still have copies to make. But it's all down hill from here.

It's hard to believe that we're going into the 4th, 2nd and K4 grades. Wow.It seems like just yesterday I was doing K and K4.

11 comments:

I'm really missing prepping for another school year. That's not to say that we haven't been doing school work through the summer! The boys have been doing lots of reading and a bit of math. Yup, I'm mean like that :-)

I tear out all the pages too but my system is a little different. You know if you have a table saw or jigsaw you can just cut the spine off each book and there you have allthe loose pages in one whack!

I'm shocked and impressed and totally awed by your diligence. Sheesh, I can't even get all the laundry done in one week before it piles up all over the laundry room from the next week. But I'm getting a killer tan and drinkin lots of Diet Pepsi and tea by the pool - does that count?! :)